Exclusive: See the First Kaiju vs. Jaeger Fight in the Pacific Rim Graphic Novel

In a summer packed with adaptations, sequels and prequels, director Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim stands out as something pretty different: an original story. And whereas a lot of the season’s hot properties are adapted from comics — Iron Man 3, The Wolverine — his flick is flipping the script and adapting its source material into a graphic novel prequel.

Pacific Rim: Tales From Year Zero, in stores tomorrow, was created out of the bible of information that del Toro and screenwriter Travis Beacham developed to flesh-out the canon of their cinematic universe — 12 years of history leading up to the kaiju-vs.-Jaeger battles in the film. Their master documents also have detailed histories on 21 different Jaeger models and 51 kaiju, most of which don’t even make their way into the film.

“We’ve listed every single battle that happens, where it takes place, when it takes place, what the kaiju’s name was, what the Jaeger’s name was, who the pilots were, and the circumstances of the battle,” said Beacham, who also wrote the graphic novel.

The very first Jaeger versus kaiju fight, teased above in some exclusive panels from the graphic novel, involved a Jaeger prototype named Brawler Yukon near Vancouver with a test crew at the controls, said Beacham, who wrote the graphic novel. “Up until now, nuclear weapons have been the only way any kaiju has been killed. The outside world has never seen or heard of Jaegers,” Beacham told Wired. “This is the battle that changes everything. The narrator [on these panels] is Dr. Jasper Schoenfeld, an engineer who will come to be known as the Father of the Jaeger Program.”

The bulk of Tales From Year Zero focus on the very early days of the kaiju invasion, and the “in order to fight monsters, we created monsters of our own” idea that Charlie Hunnam’s voiceover mentions in the Pacific Rim trailer. Its intent is to dig deeper on all the ways earthlings tried to fight off the kaiju invasion. Each section of the history has a distinct look, Beacham noted, because each era was penciled by one of five different artists (Sean Chen, Yvel Guichet, Pericles Junior, Chris Batista and Geoff Shaw).

In addition to helping craft that historical story arc for the graphic novel, having a huge narrative already written gives Pacific Rim an advantage at the multiplex too.

“With bad sci-fi – sci-fi that I don’t really like – you watch it and get the impression that you’re just seeing exactly what they created because they needed it in the movie,” Beacham said. “You feel like there’s nothing more beyond that. But with the good stuff you feel like the world has depth and has texture and that if you stepped in and you looked around the corner you would see that the streets kept going and there was other stuff happening. I’ve always thought that was important, especially for genre stuff.”

It also provides a good fodder for that Pacific Rim sequel that’s already in the works, despite the fact that the first film isn’t even in theaters yet. Beacham said he and del Toro are still working on what the story for the sequel could be, but it will very much live in the universe the pair are unleashing onto the world this summer.

“Both with the graphic novel and with these sequel talks, it’s all stemming from discussions we’ve had in creation of the first movie,” Beacham said. “It’s all kind of rooted in the same world, they’re all branches off of the same tree.”